BioWare Explains Mass Effect 5 Silence

A senior developer at BioWare has explained why there’s been no recent updates on the studio’s next game, half a decade on from announcing Mass Effect 5.

BioWare’s most recent Mass Effect 5 update dropped last November, when it released a fresh piece of concept art and publisher EA recommitted to the future of Mass Effect, despite downsizing the studio behind it. Since then? Silence, other than a job ad for a senior team member.

Now, Mass Effect franchise boss Mike Gamble has provided the briefest of updates to explain why everything’s gone quiet once again.

“Just busy workin,” Gamble wrote on X/Twitter, responding to a fan who asked for an update. “Not a lot of time for tease.” It’s a brief update, but perhaps fittingly so if the studio really is that busy.

Of course, while BioWare committed to making Mass Effect 5 back in 2020, the storied RPG studio was still deep in development on Dragon Age: The Veilguard at the time. After a long and bumpy road to release, The Veilguard ultimately launched in late 2024 to a mixed response, prompting job losses and a far smaller BioWare as a result.

While the layoffs seemed like a semi-permanent thinning of BioWare’s ranks, the company explained this by reasoning that Mass Effect 5 was still in early development, and so it simply didn’t yet need more staff. Still, fans are hoping that 2026 will provide more news on the franchise’s long-promised next entry, as its development team hopefully begins ramping up.

While there’s still no suggestion of when Mass Effect 5 will actually arrive, BioWare’s half a decade of gradual teases has drip-fed fans with a fair amount of information.

We know that Mass Effect 5 will be set hundreds of years after Mass Effect 3, and feature a story that re-centers the action on the franchise’s original Milky Way setting, long after the Reapers were defeated. Presumably, by the point Mass Effect 5 is set, the many ripples of your ME3 ending choices will have largely smoothed out.

Fan-favorite character Liara is back, hundreds of years older, as are the geth. Andromeda races are also expected to make an appearance, suggesting contact has been made with the colonists that travelled there. The intervening years have been rough on the warlike krogan, who fought a civil war. But there’s still an N7 program — and it looks a lot like you’ll be playing a fresh member of its elite ranks.

Romance is also (of course) making a return, and it sounds like the Paragon/Renegade system will be back, too.

Hopefully bridging the gap to Mass Effect 5 will be Amazon Prime Video’s live-action Mass Effect series, which is taking its time to go into full production but currently sounds like it might actually get made. This will also be set after the events of Mass Effect 3, and tell a fresh story that sounds like it will ease fans towards ME5’s era. Earlier this week, Mass Effect TV series co-showrunner Daniel Casey refuted a report that suggested the upcoming adaptation had recently undergone rewrites to be “more appealing to non-gamers.”

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social